A little story, part 3

The little boy was having a hard time adjusting once he was released. He felt unrelated to everyone. It seemed to him that in one year the entire world had changed, and he felt as if he had slept through it.

He still had no friends, his parents were more worried than ever, and his Big Brother was no longer interested in him at all. He became a quite and impenetrable wall to everyone. He no longer cooperated with therapists, they had destroyed his trust. He no longer trusted anyone but himself. The school he had gone to eventually refused to allow him back and expelled him. But the loving parents arranged home schooling so that the boy would not be without. The parents had no idea what to do anymore, they were at the end of the line. They lived in a small town with only 700 people and the only junior high school in the area refused to let the little boy back in.

So in April of 1989 when Grandma got sick, it appeared to everyone to be a blessing in disguise. The loving parents decided that it was time to disappear from their lives and start over completely somewhere new, and hopefully this would give the boy the chance to begin new with a clean slate. May first 1989 the boy and his Big Brother got on a plane alone and flew to California to meet up with Mom who had flown out a month earlier to take care of grandma and get herself settled. Dad took a job playing for soldiers in Europe, so when he took the boys to the airport they all seemed to go their own separate ways.

The boy was thrilled that he could be anyone he wanted this time and no one from his old life would follow him here. He couldn’t wait to start a new school that he might actually stay at long enough to get some real friends. On registration day, Mom took the boy to school and registered him directly into the special education classes. The boy’s heart sank back into despair. It seemed the end of his clean slate and the beginning of a whole new level of torture. He managed to barely make it through the first year of high school. He tried to make himself as invisible as possible so that no one would ever remember him, should he come back to this school again.

During the summer, he and his Big Brother had a little bit of a reprieve. They hung out a lot and went to the pool together all the time and Mom and Dad would even let them go all the way to the beach by themselves. That summer was one of the best that the boy ever knew. When it came time to register for school for sophomore year, Mom took the boy again to the school, and was about to register the boy into special education again. The boy stopped and said to his mother: “if you make me take those classes for one more day, I will drop out of school. This is no new start, it is the same thing somewhere new, and I will not do it again.”

This was very brave of the boy because he was terrified of what she would say. This was the first time he could remember that he had taken a stand for himself and went against what his parents thought was best for him. His Mom looked at him in that way she has and said “Do you really think you can handle a normal class schedule?”

“yes, I can. And even if it the hardest thing I will ever do, I will do it because I have never wanted anything as much as to be normal and be in the normal kids classes.” And she said ok, and the boy began his new start a year late. With luck he had made very little impression his first year, and when the second year rolled around he became a good student and excelled in his studies. He was on his way to being what he had always dreamed of being; normal.